Unveiling Rental Disparities among Freelancers in NYC
DATA VISUALISATION
21 OCT-16 DEC 2021
SVA NYC
This project was done for the course Mapping Design whose goals were to:
- Apply critical thinking & sensemaking through analysis, argumentation, communication, and research-based methodologies.
- Understand and debate the structural internal and external systems at play in our communities and apply that intersectional thinking to the analysis and collection of information.
- Adapt methods, behaviors, and perspectives to translate complexity, data, and concepts into compelling narratives and visualizations.
Brief:
Identify a social issue, exploring its current state and reimaging its future. Once selected, complete this sentence
“How can we reimagine___________ to be more equitable and inclusive?”
Final Deliverables:
- A stakeholder map
- A current state map
- A map of your choice to help tell your story
We chose to explore the process of applying for rental unit as a freelancer in New York City.
The new york city rental market is known to be notoriously competetive and it also continues to underserve a large portion of the city’s population.
We wanted to take a look at how, being a freelancer in new york city, you’re denied access to a large part of the city. We collected the average rates of various freelancer jobs by looking at the freelancer websites like upwork, fiver and freelancer to undertand the average base rate of various jobs.
We used an existing database that gave us access to understanding the rental rates around the city to calculate it’s affordability.
an interactive map
that let’s the user experience what lifestyle they can afford with having different freelancing jobs. And the number of hours they’d need to put in to sustain it. The unaffordable areas light up in red and to nobody’s surprise most of Manhattan lit up red.
For our current state map, we took a look at the ardous ordeal a freelancer has to go through while applying to rent a unit in the city.
All brokers require the following documents as a form of reasonable and good faith determination-
- 2 years of tax returns
- 3 months of bank statements
- Last two pay stubs
- Copy of your photo ID
If you do not pass the above criteria then you would need a guarantor that has a US credit history and is willing to cosign the apartment with you & take legal responsibility for it.
Our group wanted to depict this sisyphean process and chose a board game as the best way to illustrate this process.
The game is simple, you pick a Yes/No card every where the card symbol appears.
The more documentation you have, the better your chances are to go ahead.
You roll a dice everytime you come across the dice icon to mimic how luck based it feels like
to submit applications to rent a unit.
For the last map, we wanted to understand the stakeholders present and the underlying system that causes this. As we built this map, we learnt what opposing forces play a part in keeping this inequitable system in place.